It’s safe to say that I am an animal lover. I take roving bugs outside, feed homeless cats, and ask Phil if we can adopt every dog in the local animal shelter. If I put a foot wrong and step on a snail, I am just as crushed as he is (terrible joke – I’m sorry). I’m teetering dangerously close to getting one of those brooms that Buddhist monks carry to sweep away tiny critters in their path. But put a bloody steak in front of me, and I start drooling.
If you’re whistling “One of These Things is Not Like the Others” to yourself right now, you’re not alone. I’ve thought a lot lately about my deeply-held love of animals, and how I should reconcile it with my love of eating meat. But first, let me give you a little background.
Carnivorousness was and is a deeply-held tenet in my family’s belief system. No matter the meal, meat is always the pièce de résistance – the thing you pick first and built the rest of the meal around. Dad got promoted? Crown roast. Meaghan got cast in the school play? Breaded pork chops. Molly actually went to Latin IV? Chicken fried steak. If something really extraordinary happens, we might treat ourselves to an evening out – at a steakhouse –to let someone else do the meat prep for us. Good times always call for good food, and we can’t do good food without good meat.
Quite simply, I never gave much thought to where the meat I was eating actually came from. In my mind, nothing existed before it hit the HEB butcher’s block. What ultimately ended up on my plate was so divorced from a pig, cow, or chicken, it gave me absolutely no pause – until recently.
It turns out that getting married and starting your own home means that you’re actually responsible for making your own food. Left to my own shopping and cooking devices, my meals aren’t quite so meat-centric. I’ve even been known to eat salads for lunch (salads!). But it’s still tempting to make a bee-line for the meat department every time I go to the grocery store.
Sometimes I do just that, returning home with a pack of ground turkey, some boneless chicken breast, a pork chop or two, and several links of hot Italian sausage. Spoiler alert: no one gets around to cooking all of that before it spoils, and tossing what used to be a pig into the trash can makes me visibly cringe. That animal died so that I could eat it, and I had Wendy’s for dinner last night rather than make use of it. What a waste.
So what’s the right thing to do? Well, the way I see it, I’ve got three options:
1. Keep buying grocery store meat, just buy it when I’m actually going to, you know, eat it.
This should be easy enough, but it’s just not. For me, being in the grocery store feels like a public apology. Grocery carts were clearly built for people about 8 inches taller than me, and pushing them around makes me feel like a child – a child who is always in someone’s way. I’M REALLY SORRY, EVERYONE, I’M JUST TRYING TO SEE IF THESE EGGS COME FROM FREE-RANGE HENS OR NOT. I want to be there as little as possible, so I go once a week (or less, if I can help it) and buy ALL THE THINGS. It turns out I cannot, in fact, eat all the things. This option requires high heels and nerves of steel, and I’m just not sure I’ve got ‘em.
2. Buy from somewhere that's more transparent about the origins of their meat.
Isn’t it weird that, as a culture, we’re completely okay with eating a dead animal whose origins are completely unknown? HEB could literally be selling us all roadkill, and we’d be none the wiser. (They definitely aren’t – HEB wouldn’t do me like that). When I buy beef, I would love to know what the cow was fed, whether or not it was free-grazing, how humanely it was treated, and what farm (or at least city) it came from. If Chipotle can do it, the grocery store should be able to, too. Whole Foods actually does a fairly decent job of rating their meat on a scale from 1-5 based on how humanely the animal was raised and what it was fed. I’m just not sure I’m hip enough to mingle regularly with the crunchy yoga teachers who are “so into kale right now.”
3. Quit eating meat altogether.
This sure seems like the right thing to do. After all, my primary concern about eating meat is not where it came from or what it was fed, but why I had to kill it at all. This is the only option among the three that truly allows me to fully reconcile my diet and my love of animals, but doing so feels like a rejection of my very identity. Some sacred Sunday in the distant future, I’m going to turn down my dad’s rib-eye without batting an eye? Doubtful. We’re TEXANS, damnit – even those of us who are really Californians; we eat meat!
While I continue to do some soul-searching on the topic, I plan to at least be a little more careful about the amount of meat I purchase, and a little more grateful for the animals who provide it. And maybe I’ll get one of those brooms while I’m at it, too.